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Stephen Parle, 38, manager of the site, explained exactly how a letter, Christmas card or gift makes its way to a loved one after you post it in Liverpool.

A postman picks it up, usually in the afternoon, from a local postbox or Post Office, and takes it to either the south Liverpool office in Brunswick Dock or the north Liverpool office near Sandhills.

The Royal Mail processing unit in Liverpool

The post is then broken down into letters and parcels, and a red van pulls up outside to take it to the giant Warrington mail centre for sorting.

The Warrington centre has giant machines which can sort 40,000 items an hour, dealing with post for much of the north west after the closure of Liverpool’s Copperas Hill office in 2010.

Any post for Liverpool households from across Britain or the globe is also sent to Warrington.

The machines in Warrington break it down by postcode, and send it to one of more than a dozen small Liverpool sorting offices, like in Garston, Bootle or West Derby.

Some of the post the south Liverpool office sends to Warrington is actually sent back again - as the Brunswick Dock site is also the final stage for all post for L1, L2, L3 and L8 postcodes.

The Royal Mail processing unit in Liverpool

Workers here feed local letters and cards on a conveyor belt into a large machine, which fires the letters out again at breakneck speed into different racks for different streets.

The machine then fires the letters out again in numerical order, and they are taken to individual postal staff’s workstations.

The last piece of sorting is done by hand, with postmen or postwomen ordering letters to give the most efficient route - and then they set off on their delivery rounds.

Mr Parle, who started as a postman at Copperas Hill as a teenager, said: “We’ve got around 120 staff working here, across 24 hours. We’ve got huge numbers of letters, and 5,000 parcels alone every day.

“The city centre post grows every year, mainly with students - we see it rise in September when they order new stuff.

“The run-up to Christmas is our busiest period, but the week around Black Friday was the biggest outside it.”